I was reminded of that Dostoevesky quotation (see preceding post) whilst reading J M Tyree's piece.
American Notes for General Circulation — J M Tyree:
Without pretending to legal expertise, we know in our hearts that the system developed at Camp Delta and later at Abu Ghraib is extrajudicial because it requires: a) punishment prior to trial; b) interrogation without procedural rights; c) conceptual confusion about who is responsible for judgment, interrogation, or punishment; d) a lack of fixedness about the crimes, identity, or legal status of the "accused." We know that an extrajudicial category, the "enemy combatant," has been set up; what we don't know yet is what security apparatus is authorized to make judgments about "enemy combatants" or how their interrogation, punishment, or guilt is to be determined, and in what order. Everything has been mixed up and mixed together, so that the accused are punished before they are charged, and interrogated with punishment as part of a determination of guilt.
This is all, in a strict sense, beyond belief, and yet we are in the puzzling position of watching it happening and being powerless to stop it. As another Russian writer said, man can get used to anything — the beast. One is charged with not getting used to this and not giving in to the temptation to pretend that everything is operating according to the normal rules. The United States is now caught up in a hallucinatory fog, in which the one thing that cannot be admitted is that the attacks of September 11 succeeded in driving the country insane.
A reported U.S. plan to keep some suspected terrorists imprisoned for a lifetime even if the government lacks evidence to charge them in courts was swiftly condemned on Sunday as a "bad idea" by a leading Republican senator. The Pentagon … and the CIA … have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for those it was unwilling to set free or turn over to U.S. or foreign courts, the Washington Post said in a report that cited intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials. Some detentions could potentially last a lifetime, the newspaper said. Influential senators denounced the idea as probably unconstitutional. "It's a bad idea. So we ought to get over it and we ought to have a very careful, constitutional look at this," Republican Sen. Richard Lugar … of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said on "Fox News Sunday." … As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask the U.S. Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence, defense officials told the Washington Post. The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow inmates more comfort and freedom than they have now, and would be designed for prisoners the government believes have no more intelligence to share, the newspaper said. "It would be modeled on a U.S. prison and would allow socializing among inmates," the paper said. "Since global war on terror is a long-term effort, it makes sense for us to be looking at solutions for long-term problems," Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, was quoted as saying. "This has been evolutionary, but we are at a point in time where we have to say, 'How do you deal with them in the long term?"'
